undeniably successful and triumphant beyond all else in the history
whether of fraud or fiction--the infidel must believe as follows: On
the first hypothesis, he must believe that a vast number of apparent
miracles--involving the most astounding phenomena--such as the instant
restoration of the sick, blind, deaf, and lame, and the resurrection
of the dead--performed in open day, amidst multitudes of malignant
enemies--imposed alike on all, and triumphed at once over the strongest
prejudices and the deepest enmity:--those who received them and those
who rejected them differing only in the certainly not very trifling
particular--as to whether they came from heaven or from hell. He
must believe that those who were thus successful in this extraordinary
conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense, were Galilaean
Jews, such as all history of the period represents them; ignorant,
obscure, illiterate; and, above all, previously bigoted, like all
their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other
religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must
believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds in the face both of
Jews and Gentiles as an open evidence of the truth of a new revelation,
and demanding on the strength of them that their countrymen should
surrender a religion which they acknowledged to be divine, and that all
other nations should abandon their scarcely less venerable systems
of superstition, they rapidly succeeded in both these very probable
adventures; and in a few years, though without arms, power, wealth,
or science, were to an enormous extent victorious over all prejudice,
philosophy, and persecution; and in three centuries took nearly
undisputed possession, amongst many nations, of the temples of the
ejected deities. He must farther believe that the original performers,
in these prodigious frauds on the world, acted not only without
any assignable motive, but against all assignable motive; that they
maintained this uniform constancy in unprofitable falsehoods, not only